Is Sexuality a Matter of First Importance?

Sam Allberry

The apostle Paul’s discussion of same-sex sexuality in 1 Corinthians 6 is a clear, compassionate, and proportionate model for church leaders.

Illustration by Alex Nabaum

Earlier this year, many of us watched replays of the tragic collision and collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, leading to the loss of several lives and causing enormous damage and disruption.

As footage emerged, it was striking to see how immediately and totally the bridge seemed to come down. It looked like it happened all at once. The bridge had been constructed without any redundant support structures. The tragedy revealed that all of its supports were essential. Knock any one of these out and the whole thing will fall.

We might say something similar about Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11, one of the key biblical texts that addresses same-sex sexuality. This is not the sole focus of the text—Paul is talking about various sins—but it nevertheless provides essential foundations for how we should approach this whole issue as Christian believers.

In Western (and increasingly non-Western) cultures today, full affirmation of LGBTQ sexual identities and lifestyles is a litmus test of social acceptance. When I was at university in the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton was still affirming marriage as being between a man and a woman. On secular university campuses today, politically conservative voices defending traditional marriage are rare and virulently opposed. The cultural pressure on churches to switch to an affirming stance is increasingly heavy.

In today’s climate, the church cannot afford to neglect Paul’s words. Paul makes five vital points in 1 Corinthians 6 about same-sex sexuality. None of his words are wasted. Each facet of his teaching needs to be upheld alongside the others, like vital supports of a bridge. Neglecting any one will destabilize our approach.

While addressing legal disputes among Christians in 1 Corinthians 6, Paul interjects a stark question: “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?” (v. 9, ESV throughout).

The kingdom of God, of course, is God’s loving rule over his people, begun now in Christ and one day coming in its fullness. It is the life we were created for, the world as it was meant to be. It is what millions of people unknowingly crave every time they say life’s “not supposed to be this way.” It’s what we can receive through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Whatever else one might miss out on in life, nothing would be more tragic and devastating than to fail to inherit the kingdom of God. The stakes could not be higher.

Having made a blanket statement about “the unrighteous,” Paul provides some specific examples:

Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. (vv. 9–10)

The two Greek terms translated here as “men who practice homosexuality” are malakoi and arsenokoitai—literally “soft” or effeminate ones and “men-bedders”—the passive and active willing participants in homosexual sex, respectively. Arsenokoitai is the combining of the two words used in the Greek translation of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, passages that both condemn a man lying with a man “as with a woman.”

Paul provides no indication that he is referring only to coerced, nonconsensual same-sex activity (which was common in the ancient world); his language is broad and encompassing of all same-sex sexual conduct. Paul is moving no goalposts, introducing no innovation; he is simply lining up with what Scripture has always said: that same-sex sexual intimacy is sinful. In the New Covenant, God’s design for human sexuality remains the same.

Evangelicals are used to differing over issues of secondary importance. The Bible itself talks about how some topics can be disputable matters, where earnest Christians reach differing conclusions in good conscience (Rom. 14). We think of differing convictions over the details surrounding the return of Christ, whether all the miraculous spiritual gifts are operative in the church today, or the appropriate age for (and mode of) baptism.

Our need to agree to disagree means we can too quickly assume that any issue on which Christians differ must by definition be of secondary importance. But Paul shows us this is not the case with same-sex sexuality.

No sin is trivial because all sin is ultimately rebellion against God (1 John 3:4). But by including same-sex sexuality in this list, Paul shows us how deeply serious a sin it is. Eternity is at stake.

Not only does he stress the eternal implications of failing to repent of this; he also warns his readers not to be deceived about it.

Paul is expecting voices in or around the Corinthian church to preach contrary to what he is writing. We certainly hear many such voices in the church today, claiming not only that it is right to allow same-sex relationships for Christians but even that such relationships receive God’s blessing. But Paul is unequivocal in his message. To bless what God condemns is to keep people from the kingdom—to send them to destruction. Homosexuality is not trivial.

An observant reader of this passage would rightly point out that Paul’s reference to same-sex sexuality is embedded in a list of various sins both sexual (such as sexual immorality and adultery) and nonsexual (such as drunkenness and greed). All are disqualifying for inheriting the kingdom of God. These sins are very different, but they are all equally grave.

This is not the only time same-sex sexuality is addressed in the context of other, varying sins. In Leviticus, the two prohibitions against it come in the context of other forms of sexual sin. It is described as an abomination (again underlining how grave it is), but it is not the only behavior to be described this way. Proverbs, for example, lists deceitful speech, pride, and murder as being similarly abominable (6:16–19).

In the New Testament, we continue to see same-sex sexuality listed among other sins. In 1 Timothy 1:9–10, just as in 1 Corinthians 6, it is included alongside both sexual and nonsexual sins (such as perjury and striking parents). Even in Romans 1, where same-sex sexuality is given some prominence, it is given so precisely because it is emblematic of something true of all of us—we exchange the natural and divinely ordered for the unnatural and transgressive—and as part of a mounting case that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23).

The fact that biblical references to same-sex sexuality mention it alongside very different forms of sin demonstrates that it is not in a category of its own. We must be careful not to single it out in a way that suggests it is.

When we do need to mention it (as we surely do in today’s culture), we should follow the biblical authors’ cue and mention it alongside other equally grave sins. Part of our commitment to the authority of Scripture is reflecting its balance and proportion, not giving undue weight to one part of its teaching or neglecting others.

In some of the recent conversations about same-sex sexuality, I’ve been struck by two things. One, evangelical leaders like to use the theological term concupiscence in the context of sexuality; but I’ve yet to hear it in connection with any other sin.

Concupiscence is the idea that not only our acts but also our desires are fallen and sinful. We see this perhaps most famously in Jesus’ teaching that looking at someone with lustful intent amounts to committing adultery (Matt. 5:28). It is not just physical sexual acts that can be sinful, but mental ones too. (Indeed, it is hard to resist a physical sin after mentally rehearsing it.)

So same-sex sexual desire is a sin in the form of lust or emotional idolatry. This needs to be said when many in the evangelical world want to say the desires are somehow neutral. But the concept of concupiscence seems to be so rigorously applied to this sin and not to others.

Two, I have also wondered why so many voices condemning same-sex sexuality in particular are not as passionately condemning other sins.

When some denominations are discussing disqualifying from ordination any candidate who struggles with (and is repenting of) same-sex desire, I wonder why the same is not said of those who may be struggling with greed. If the justification for such disqualification is that Western culture is promoting and celebrating same-sex sexuality, then I’d suggest the very same thing needs to be said about greed. Not everything about greed is true of same-sex sexuality, but who can deny that our culture thrives on and fuels greed?

Both twist what God has given us in creation. One denies the good distinction in creation between male and female by attempting to make them interchangeable in sex and marriage. The other does the same to the distinction between heaven and earth, thinking that by sheer acquisition we can turn the latter into the former. Putting the question another way, which is drawing more Americans into idolatry and away from the kingdom of God: same-sex sexuality or greed?

Or when was the last time you heard a pastor preach against reviling (which Paul also mentions here)? Evangelical and Reformed discourse (especially on social media) is awash with reviling and accusation.

All of the sins Paul mentions deserve our careful and sober reflection. All of us struggle with something on his list. We should be most distressed by our own sin.

In a fallen world, each fallen culture will be more disposed to particular sins than others. Christian leaders will often find themselves having to address some sins more frequently than others, simply in response to cultural messaging. There is no question that, right now, same-sex sexuality is being forcefully promoted in Western institutions. Given this, it is no surprise that we are seeing more same-sex sexual sin in the world around us.

When a sin receives a high level of publicity, it is not just providing legitimacy for those already disposed to engage in it, but it is also encouraging others to engage in it who otherwise never would have. (One example of this is the explosive growth of younger people identifying as nonbinary, especially the phenomenon of rapid onset gender dysphoria.) The church should speak more strongly into this matter. It is necessary to respond to what is being thrust upon us by our culture.

But we would be wrong to conclude from this that same-sex sexuality is only a Western problem. Last year I had the privilege of attending a conference for Anglicans from around the world hosted by the wonderful leadership of the Anglican Church of Rwanda. It was exhilarating to gather, worship, and take counsel with such a culturally wide range of believers. I led a workshop on the theology of the body and how it applies to discussions about sexuality and gender.

Several times at the conference, I heard leaders say that same-sex sexuality is not an issue in non-Western countries. One directly told me, “It is not an issue in Africa.”

But Paul’s inclusion of it in 1 Corinthians 6 reminds us that it is not just a contemporary Western issue. It is a fallen human issue. While it may not be as prevalent in other parts of the world, that doesn’t mean it is obsolete there. In fact, I regularly hear from African believers wrestling with same-sex attraction looking for ways to find support.

Like greed, theft, and drunkenness, same-sex sexuality existed in ancient Corinth and exists today. We should not be surprised to see any of the sins Paul mentions bubbling up in any human heart. Same-sex sexuality is not unexpected.

Next, Paul takes an abrupt and beautiful turn after condemning sin: “And such were some of you,” he says (v. 11). Paul’s readers have already and decisively changed. Transformation has already come.

Paul did not list random sins. These are contextual sins in which Corinthian Christians had once been living, sins that had defined them. Yet God intervened. Such were some of you. What they once were, they are no longer. Paul explains what accounts for this dramatic change: “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (v. 11).

The Corinthians were washed: God cleansed them of their sin through the shed blood of Christ. What should have counted against them has been taken away. As Paul puts it elsewhere, God has “forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us” (Col. 2:13–14).

They were sanctified: God not only washed them but made them new and set them apart as his own. A decisive change has taken place in their relationship to sin. They are no longer under its dominion and rule, enslaved to its wants and ways.

And they were justified: God declared them to be right with him, acquitted and free from any charge that might be brought against them. He can now be eternally for them.

These words give all Christians deep encouragement. No sin is inescapable. The Corinthians needed to be reminded of this, and so do we. So many of these sins can feel as though we might never be free of them. So often the lie of the Evil One is that a given sin is part of our identity, that there is no point in trying to deny it or live differently.

But the glorious truth is seen in the dramatic contrast between what these Corinthians were and who they now are. It gives us great hope for those we know who seem enmeshed in same-sex sexual sin. No sin is inescapable.

One of the sad patterns in the Bible is the people of God being tempted to return to something they were delivered from. The Israelites in the Old Testament, powerfully delivered from bondage in Egypt, long to return to it.

And the Corinthian church members still need to be warned about the seriousness of the sins they have been so gloriously converted from. They need to be reminded that those who continue in sin risk exclusion from the kingdom of God. They need to be alerted to the voices seeking to deceive them.

Christians can still be tempted by past sins after conversion. We have been made new, but we also continue to feel the presence of our sinful flesh.

When I moved across town a few years ago, I spent the first few days driving back to my old house by mistake. Similarly, no matter how dramatic the conversion, we retain muscle memory of our past sins.

Christians from a gay background should not be surprised if they feel some residue of desire toward that sin, however decisively in their heart they have broken away from it. The healthy Christian life isn’t evidenced by a lack of battles with sin but by full-out war with it (Gal. 5:17). We are commanded to “put to death the deeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13), which wouldn’t need to be said if we were now immune to those very deeds.

As we consider the sins Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, we may find that one or more remain a long-term form of temptation for us. There may be some in our churches who, though deeply converted to Christ and growing in him, continue to feel temptation toward same-sex sexuality. This does not call into question the legitimacy of their conversion or the health of their walk with the Lord.

As those who were washed, sanctified, and justified, we still need to be warned against sin. We are not yet immune. We will still feel the presence of our sinful nature until we receive our resurrection bodies raised in full power and glory (1 Cor. 15:43), being like Jesus “because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). In the meantime, we press on, justified but still vulnerable, freed but not yet fully free, tempted but nonetheless rejoicing.

The five truth statements in 1 Corinthians are all crucial foundations for a healthy biblical perspective on same-sex sexuality. They need to be held together. Neglecting any one of them will lead to the loss of that health.

To neglect the clear teaching of Scripture that those who practice homosexuality will not inherit the kingdom of heaven is to send men and women to destruction and deny them the blessing of repentance. To treat same-sex sexuality as if it is a unique category of sin is to leave many people feeling out of reach of God’s grace and to leave others feeling (equally dangerously) superior to those who experience same-sex attraction. To claim that same-sex sexuality is a unique problem can make those who feel drawn to it feel invisible. How will those tempted by same-sex attraction hear the gospel if no one even knows they are there?

To deny that same-sex sexuality is escapable, on the other hand, is to deny the life-changing power of the gospel and to leave people thinking that their sin defines them.

And removing the final pillar—denying that temptation continues for the believer—would give sincere Christians fleeing sin little or no pastoral support. It makes confession more difficult, fans the flames of shame, and makes those tempted even more vulnerable to falling back into the very sin they are seeking to avoid.

We have all that we need in God’s written Word. But we need all that God has to say about such an urgent and personal topic. We need the constant recalibration of returning to Scripture, to its warnings, its reassurances, and its truly matchless hope.

Sam Allberry is associate pastor of Immanuel Nashville and the author of Is God Anti-Gay? and You’re Not Crazy.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Sexuality Is Not a Minor Issue".

- More from Sam Allberry

Ideas

Evil Is Not the Essential Feature of Reality

Russell Moore and Marilynne Robinson

Editor in Chief

Russell Moore is joined by Marilynne Robinson for a conversation on reading Genesis as a story of grace.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

This article is an excerpt of a conversation on CT’s podcast The Russell Moore Show. Listen to the full conversation here.

Marilynne Robinson and Russell Moore

Russell Moore: I’ll tell you what was surprising to me about Reading Genesis: I expected certain themes to be there—such as the mystery of human beings and the fact that we’re not reducible to causes and effects. But one of the things I was surprised by is that this is a book about grace and forgiveness. The Cain and Abel narrative shows up repeatedly in ways I hadn’t considered—from Lamech all the way on to Joseph and his brothers.

There is a sense of moral shock in the fact that God would protect Cain after killing his brother. And it struck me that, as with so many other things in the Bible, the familiarity that we have with it reduces that sense of shock that that is intended.

Marilynne Robinson: It was a question that came up in a class, but it shocked me too. And I think that was the beginning of my reappraisal of these stories, because the obvious importance of Cain and Abel is a master narrative of so much else. The mark of Cain, which we know protected him, was something that stigmatized him.

RM: I’ve kind of unconsciously seen the story as primarily about Cain and Abel’s rivalry, Abel’s subsequent murder, sacrifice, and so forth, and only secondarily about God’s response to Cain. But now, after reading your book, I’m rethinking that because it seems that the most startling thing here is not just a brother’s blood cries from the ground, but that God doesn’t execute the murderer—he protects him. And that’s something that you demonstrate repeatedly through Reading Genesis.

MR: It’s such a strongly recurring theme. If one were writing an 800-page novel and any idea recurred several times in the 800 pages, people would say, “This is what this is about!” But here we see it over and over again in a much smaller space, and you don’t have the reverse. I think that narrative is structured to be meaningful in the same way that language is—in the sense that we can see a good narrative with confidence that it means something. There are ways in which it develops meaning through repetition.

RM: How should we explain to someone who says, “I read the text talking about ‘and it was very good,’ and yet I don’t experience the world that way. I experience the world as very cruel”?

MR: Well, it is a theodicy. That is the great question that runs right through the Bible itself. The Crucifixion is very cruel also, you know. I think of the overwhelming goodness, as it were, of the fact that we exist and that we exist on this speck of planet with things that are simultaneous with our own needs, our own sense of the beautiful, our own powerful awe, and so on. I think that the essential sense of goodness has to be implanted in a realization of existence itself. “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4, KJV throughout).

Many people feel that the problem of evil is unanswerable. Therefore, evil becomes the essential feature of reality, as far as many people are concerned. I think that this is a question of perspective. God knows all the examples of evil and grief and injury and so on that we can see every moment of any day.

RM: Social psychologist and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written about the current era, fragmented as we are by social media and resentment and polarization, as being a Tower of Babel. And I wondered, as I was reading your account of Babel, whether you would agree with him that we’re uniquely in a situation like that, as opposed to other eras. Or is this just the way the world is and we have a particular expression of it now?

MR: Well, in the actual story of Babel, it is God that creates languages, and he doesn’t subordinate any language to any other. It’s a way of disarming people—creating virtual places in the world by creating different languages. I think that the Babel story is an act of intervention on the part of God, whose presence seems to be oddly forgotten much of the time, that sees human possibilities as dangerous to human beings and steps in and precludes that kind of development at that moment—but doesn’t disable people, doesn’t punish them, doesn’t create invidious comparisons among Babylonians and anyone else. In other words, if there’s an analogy to Babel, I think that it should be that people that live in scattered cultures can participate in something global, which could be wonderful.

RM: Right before I read this book, I was teaching on Joseph, and I made the comment that I find him a very unlikable figure—and in many ways, an annoying figure. Someone [in the room] was shocked that I would say that, but I could say the same thing about Sarah and Jacob and a few other people. You make the point that these people in this narrative are not intended to be heroic figures or examples of moral instruction. I think a lot of people miss that when they’re reading Genesis devotionally and think, I’m supposed to be looking at these people and learning then how to act and how to live.

MR: I don’t know quite what they see. We should be very grateful for the imperfections of all these people that God so endlessly loves. If we actually subscribe to the fact that we’re all flawed and that God is gracious, then that’s what we’re seeing in the text over and over again.

RM: I also thought as I was reading this book that I was hearing some echoes or explanations of sermons that Reverend Ames had preached in your various fictional books. I think this was about Abraham giving up Isaac and this entrusting of both Ishmael and Isaac to the wilderness. I wonder if you were bouncing around some of the ideas that you would pursue here, even when you were writing the novels.

MR: No doubt. The idea of grace is just surpassingly beautiful, and it makes instant sense to people when they understand what it is. It feels like the thing called for, and so that’s been a subject of my thinking for a long time. Especially in a time when religion tends to be so prohibitive and punitive, which always felt to me like an aberration—not at the center of the religion.

RM: The other thing I think that’s unique here is your view of the “Old Testament God.” When I was reading, I stopped to look up a quote that was somewhere in my mind that you had said: “A great many of us feel an emphatic moral superiority to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

MR: We’re conditioned to think the Old Testament God is brutish and that, you know, here [people] are [speaking] in another language and so on. I think that more of it than we would like to acknowledge comes from a desperation that has occurred in especially European culture over centuries to make a distinction between Christianity and Judaism.

RM: I think there are a lot of people—even committed Christians and committed Bible readers—who ascribe a kind of primitivity, sort of a wrathful picture of God in the Old Testament. Where do we get that idea? Why does that persist?

MR: The tendency has been to say that this primary impulse behind Christ- ianity is not shared by Judaism. But things like “Love thy neighbor as thyself”come from Leviticus (19:18). As in so many cases, Jesus quotes from the Old Testament. An amazing number of people don’t realize he’s quoting, even though there are footnotes, and they act as if it’s diminishing the authority of Jesus to say that, as a pious Jewish man in the first century, he’s quoting what he calls the Scriptures.

RM: One of the things that tends to be a scandal to people is the sacrifice—well, attempted sacrifice—of Isaac. And usually when I see a treatment of that, there’s a lot of moral handwringing. I was struck that what you pictured here did not seem to be “Well, let’s talk about why it was moral or immoral for God to tell Abraham to sacrifice Isaac,” but instead, this was a pictorial demonstration that God does not demand sacrifice and does not demand child sacrifice. It was almost a revelation of God’s kindness and grace, not something to be explained about God’s cruelty or arbitrary nature. I found that striking.

MR: I found out in the course of mulling things over that Carthage was everywhere in the Mediterranean, all up the coast of the Atlantic, and that it was a Semitic-language culture. There’s no way to think of it except as a huge influence. It could threaten Rome. Archaeology seems to confirm they’ve always had the reputation of child sacrifice as a big kind of state ritual. [There are] pathetic signs that people tried to smuggle a sheep or something in place of the child, and then repenting and destroying a whole bunch of children.

The name Carthage is never spoken, never appears, in the Bible. And we know they did things that were unspeakable. But we know also that the prophets tell us that this idea of child sacrifice crept in and that it was felt to be an issue, whether this could be practiced or not.

But the meaning of God’s asking for the sacrifice of Isaac and letting Abraham prove that he would make that radical a sacrifice—that he would be that faithful to what he took to be God’s command—this is something that Abraham learns about himself. But God says, A sheep will be fine. Don’t do that. It’s a potently instructive narrative, and I believe urgent. There was this example of great, powerful, rich Carthage—that was all destroyed.

I think that we don’t teach enough background to make people understand that it’s not just between Abraham and God; it’s like dealing with a phenomenon that was important throughout the whole culture, the whole region.

RM: Why, as a novelist, as somebody who plots—and I’m not treating this as just a literary text here—why does God in his providence have these themes show up repeatedly in Genesis of a woman who is barren, who’s given children in an extraordinary way? And also this theme of the eldest son being displaced by the younger?

MR: I think that the barrenness of women makes a huge point of the preciousness of a child. Primogeniture, the favoring of the eldest, which the Bible overturns repeatedly, implies that there is something external to the circumstances of the birth. The ability to be useful to God is at God’s discretion. It’s not something that is institutionally created. And I think that overturning things goes clear into the Magnificat. It means exactly that among people, who is enabled? That is at God’s discretion.

RM: When I said that Sarah is not a likable figure, a lot of that has to do with her treatment of Hagar. I loved the section where you talk about Hagar quite a bit and about some of the themes of the baby crying echoed back later with Moses, and God seeing her. Did you set out to give this special place to Hagar, or did she just resonate with you as you were writing?

MR: I think Genesis gives a very special place to Hagar. She is paired with Abraham. There is the scene of her annunciation that occurs. These scenes tend to be back to back, where Hagar is given massive assurances by an angel that her progeny will be uncountably numerous. And then you have the same thing said to Abraham. You have Abraham threatened with the loss of his child, and you have Hagar threatened with the loss of her child. Hagar gets a great deal of ink, and everything is done to underline her importance

Marilynne Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of 12 books, including the novels Housekeeping, Gilead, and Jack. Her latest book release is Reading Genesis.

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief and host of The Russell Moore Show.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Guest Appearances".

News

‘Are You Ready to Open Your Doors … And Your Toilets?’

Kristen Vonnoh

French evangelicals are working together to show people Jesus at 2024 Olympic Games.

Illustration by Blake Cale

For many people who live in Paris, the Summer Olympics are going to be kind of a problem. In fact, though the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad are not scheduled to start until the end of July, Parisians were already bracing themselves this spring.

Metro ticket prices will double, for example, and some have questioned whether the system can handle the expected influx of 16 million people. Student housing has been requisitioned to accommodate staff planning the Olympics. There is concern about the river Seine, the buildings, the work required to make the city accessible for Paralympic athletes, and even vulnerability to a terrorist attack.

French support for the Olympics has fallen 11 points in the last two years; in the region around the capital, only one out of five people now say that having the Olympics in Paris is “a very good thing.” Forty-four percent say it’s bad or very bad.

Matthew Glock is not one of them.

“I see the Olympics being a catalyst,” said Glock, an American church planter who has lived in France for more than 30 years. “It will allow churches and associations to come together and work together for the good of the city.”

Glock has been at the forefront of organizing evangelical Christians so that they can coordinate their efforts “to radiate the love of Jesus Christ in word and deed” during one of the world’s largest sporting events.

There are more than 70 evangelical churches in Paris, not counting groups that meet in homes. Only about 1 percent of the population of France is evangelical, but that’s still more than 745,000 people.

Ensemble2024 launched late last year to bring them together. The evangelical umbrella group works with about 20 groups, including sports ministries, Christian resource ministries, evangelism ministries, student ministries, and music ministries. The Conseil National des Évangéliques de France (CNEF), which represents about 70 percent of French evangelicals, is involved, as are a number of international evangelical organizations, including Youth With A Mission, Operation Mobilization, the International Mission Board, and Greater Europe Mission.

“We are creating the framework that supports the initiatives that are happening,” Glock told CT, “to better serve our city.”

The group is planning all sorts of events, from friendly community athletic competitions and viewing parties to a hymn sing at a church “a stone’s throw from the main intramural sports complex.” There will be chaplains available to Olympic competitors and times when Christian athletes can share their testimonies.

There will be no direct evangelism, however. Ensemble2024 has committed not to proselytize in order to avoid controversy in secular France.

Evangelicals, who supported the legal secularization of the country when it was instituted in 1905, have sometimes felt targeted by authorities suspicious of any religious activity more fervent than nonpracticing Catholicism. A few years ago, one state minister said the government should keep a close watch on evangelicals, claiming without evidence that they get a lot of foreign funding. Another agreed and said that evangelicals also require people to have their virginity certified before marriage, which isn’t true.

CNEF has raised concerns about religious freedom, including the freedom to evangelize, with the UN. The evangelical council sees the Olympics as an opportunity to demonstrate that evangelicals are really not harmful to French society. In fact, CNEF said in an official statement, Christians deeply resonate with the values of the games: friendship, respect, excellence, determination, equality, inspiration, and courage.

Ensemble2024 organizers hope to demonstrate their commitment to those common values as they serve people during the Olympics. They will show people Jesus more than they will talk about him.

“We are committed to a benevolent approach that meets people’s needs,” the Ensemble2024 website says.

The umbrella group hopes to see evangelical initiatives to help people who are homeless, raise awareness about prostitution and sex trafficking, and take care of the environment with trash and recycling campaigns.

Some churches may provide translators, with name tags that say, “Je parle ____” (“I speak ____”) to help the many tourists who aren’t fluent in French or English. Others, located on main pedestrian routes, will make their facilities available to the many tourists in the city.

“Are you ready to open your doors … and your toilets?” one Ensemble2024 resource guide says. “France is facing real challenges in terms of logistics: enabling many visitors during the Games in summer 2024 to have access to toilets, water points, transport options for athletes, etc. As Christians, we want above all to be there to help.”

While regular toilet cleanings and free feminine hygiene products will show the love of Christ to international visitors, other efforts are focusing specifically on French people.

The Alliance Biblique Française (French Bible Alliance), for example, has put out a French-language edition of the New Testament that includes the testimonies of 16 prominent sports figures, including the French handball champion Joël Abati and American sprinter Allyson Felix.

The New Testament was released in April, instead of later in the summer, because the goal is to get more French people to read the Bible. The Alliance is working with the Syndicat des libraires de littérature religieuse (Union of Religious Literature Booksellers) and held multiple events in in March—France’s “month of the Bible”—and April.

“We want to have a discourse vis-à-vis our contemporaries, the French population,” said Nicolas Fouquet, a Bible alliance project leader, “to address neighbors more than foreign tourists.”

Evangelical efforts to coordinate and stay out of each other’s way has been notable. Some ministries are even making the decision to step back to leave room for others.

“We are actually taking an unofficial one-year hiatus because we’ve encouraged our member associations to join in wholeheartedly with Ensemble2024,” said Tom Hawkins, who works with the sports ministry Go+ France. “So our efforts are coordinated and not in competition with each other.”

Hawkins said he expects the Olympics to lay the groundwork for a lot of future ministry opportunities. Seeing different Christian groups come together gives him hope about future evangelical cooperation in France.

“Go+ and its members will be able to profit from the legacy of partnerships created for the Games,” he said.

Legacy has been one of the buzzwords of Olympics organizers. They want to connect the 2024 games with the 1924 games that were also in Paris and convince Parisians that the work of hosting and all the inconvenience of living through the Olympics will be worth it in the long run.

A lot of the people living in Paris are unconvinced by the argument. But evangelicals, working together and coordinating outreach for the Games, think the Olympics will certainly leave behind something important.

“On a spiritual level,” Glock told CT, “we are very keen to see all that we do with an eye towards ‘What is the legacy?’”

Kristen Vonnoh is a freelance reporter in France.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Olympics Unite Evangelicals".

- More from Kristen Vonnoh

New Books Are My Profession. But (Somewhat) Older Books Are My Passion.

Matt Reynolds

Introducing a new column from CT’s senior books editor.

Illustration by Tara Anand

I love reading books, and this presents a problem. As summed up by a pair of decorative wooden blocks resting atop one of my shelves, I have “so many books, so little time.” Almost all avid readers end up echoing this lament at one time or another.

I wasn’t always overwhelmed by my books, though. In high school, I would’ve happily whiled away free hours with the Boston Globe sports page or ESPN The Magazine (fine publications featuring world-class writers). But serious books were something to suffer for the sake of good grades.

Then I went to college, where I fell in with a group of friends who genuinely enjoyed learning. I knew they were intellectually inclined because they subscribed to magazines like the religion journal First Things, which ditched glossy ads and splashy photography in favor of words on the page, page after page. But most importantly, they took delight in books—even books they weren’t reading for class.

In some mix of admiration and embarrassment, I decided I would read for leisure too. During the summer after my freshman year, I cracked open Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean’s memoir of ministering to death row inmates in a Louisiana prison. Don’t read too much into that choice; the author had come to campus the previous semester, and I still had my free copy lying around.

It’s funny—I didn’t really care for the book. Despite opposing the death penalty (at least in practice), I found Prejean’s moral censures frustratingly shallow. But here’s where I’m obliged to reach for one of those metaphors—light bulbs brightening, sparks igniting, gears clicking into place—that convey a sudden, lasting change in perspective. Having begun reading books for pleasure, I felt a compulsive need to continue.

At first I gravitated, somewhat lazily, toward works of political punditry. Nursing fanciful dreams of occupying a George Will or Thomas Friedman–like perch at one of the nation’s major dailies, I’d been writing campus newspaper op-eds, and I read to suit.

But I could only stomach that kind of diet for so long. Soon I gained an appreciation for history through David McCullough’s biography of John Adams. I developed a love of literature through Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons and A Man in Full. Friends chipped in some more highbrow recommendations like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

And eventually I dipped a toe into the massive pool of evangelical and “mere Christian” classics, finding treasures like J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. (Mere Christianity, too, and lots more C. S. Lewis besides.)

That heady phase never really cooled off. If anything, it only intensified. Today, I’m grudgingly aware of having overdone it—not in the reading itself but in the continual amassing of new things to read.

There’s my Instapaper page, so glutted with article links that a printout might stretch across a football field. There’s my messenger bag, forever stuffed with old magazines. And there’s the small mountain of books I might or might not get around to savoring. While reading still brings immense joy and edification, I often feel hopelessly stuck in catch-up mode.

That restless ache gave me the idea for this very column, The Beckoning Nightstand. It’s titled as an ode to the little table we invoke so wistfully, the one groaning under the weight of unread volumes. Fundamentally, I envision it as a way to celebrate reading books that aren’t brand new but aren’t exactly old either.

I understand the appeal of new books and the fresh conversations they can spark. As a books editor at CT for over a decade, new books are my professional world. Off the clock, however, I hardly ever read titles under a year old. They often interest me. But what else can I do but pile them up, leaving them to clamor for attention alongside their older siblings?

This aversion to newness is deeper, though, than a matter of oversupply. Maybe it’s the aftershocks of my first year at CT, when Rob Bell’s universalist flirtation, Love Wins, sent Christian thought leaders into a condemnatory frenzy. The book was certainly flawed, but I found something off-putting about such breathless engagement with What’s Happening Now—about tuning one’s reading choices to the frequency of what online types call “the discourse.”

The impulse to keep a healthy distance from daily news and social media doesn’t make me a partisan of old books—at least, not in the fashion of those whose definition of old runs closer to ten centuries ago than ten years.

Both intellectually and temperamentally, I’m on board with arguments for reading these old old books, like the one Lewis famously advanced in his introduction to Athanasius’s On the Incarnation. Yet I’m rarely keen on reading them myself. I tend to prefer reading about the past from contemporary(ish) authors who’ve absorbed their Strunk and White lessons on crisp, clear, unpretentious prose.

That leaves us with the kind of book this column will consider: not a shiny new thing, but not (necessarily) a consensus classic. Something highly regarded, maybe even surprisingly relevant to today’s world—but selected mainly because I’ve wanted to read it for a good while now. We’ll range across genres, exploring Christian and secular works alike, hopefully inspiring appreciation for how books, in all their marvelous variety, speak to what CT readers care about most.

Book lovers, I feel your pain. Together, let’s rediscover how to stare at our stacks not with weary resignation but with a renewed sense of thrill.

Matt Reynolds is CT’s senior books editor.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "So Many Books, So Little Time".

- More from Matt Reynolds

News

Church Allegedly Planned Military Takeover of Trinidad and Tobago

Daniel Silliman

And other news briefings from Christians around the world.

Illustration by Lincoln Agnew

The director of Trinidad and Tobago’s intelligence agency was allegedly planning to take over the country in a “Christian coup.” Roger Best was placed on leave in March and fired in May after police discovered he had hired multiple members of his church without putting them through the usual vetting process. He hired his pastor, Ian Ezekiel Brown, as a special reserve officer. Brown is reportedly an authoritarian leader who exercises extensive control over the lives of his congregation and preaches that Christians should be armed and control the government. Jerusalem Church has about 100 members, and 25 were in top administrative positions at the intelligence agency.

United States: Bible society museum shuttered

The American Bible Society has closed its $60 million museum. The Philadelphia tourist attraction, which opened in 2021, only got about 2 percent of the visitors the organization originally projected. This adds to the turmoil at the Bible society, which has seen five CEOs since 2022 and more than 50 percent turnover on the board. A director who left last year said there are systemic problems in the Bible society that have to be addressed but “magical thinking” makes that impossible.

United States: Some conservatives stayed with UMC in split

A study of the United Methodist Church (UMC) in North Carolina after its denominational division found that a notable number of conservatives remain. Nearly a quarter of the clergy who chose to stay oppose same-sex marriage. But most UMC clergy are liberal; about 60 percent say they tend to be to the political left of their congregations.

Kenya: Pastors planning international security mission for Haiti

Pastors are playing a key role in developing plans for a security mission that Kenyan president William Ruto hopes to send to gang-embattled Haiti. Kenya agreed last October to send 2,500 police officers to Haiti, but the force has been delayed by legal challenges. The pastors, who are part of a group organized by first lady Rachel Ruto, are praying that God will deliver from the “generational bondage and powers” of witchcraft and “flush out gangs and insurgents from their hiding places and deliver them into the hands of the police.” They are also leading the government’s fact-finding mission to work out the details necessary to restore order in Haiti.

United Kingdom: Street preacher wins free-speech struggle

Police conceded they went too far when they told a street preacher he was not allowed to talk about atheism, Islam, or other religions. Dia Moodley, a South African immigrant who preaches atop a ladder, has been engaging in raucous question-and-answer sessions in a shopping district in Bristol. Law enforcement told him he was prohibited from saying anything that would “negatively affect public health and morals.” Alliance Defending Freedom took up his case, and the police backed down.

Germany: Long COVID forces WEA leader to resign

The head of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) has resigned for health reasons. Thomas Schirrmacher, who took the leadership position in 2020, is suffering from long COVID, a condition that can involve fatigue, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, headaches, and muscle pain. The head of the WEA is required to travel regularly while representing 600 million evangelicals on the world stage. The WEA plans to appoint a replacement by September.

Israel: “Voluntourists” show solidarity

Roughly 1,500 tourists arrived in Israel every day in March to volunteer in ways that would show support for the war in Gaza, according to the government tourism ministry. Many of the solidarity missions are organized by evangelical groups such as the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem. The “voluntourists” visit sites where the terrorist organization Hamas killed Israelis on October 7, 2023, and help harvest crops, cook meals, and sort donations for Israeli refugees. Before the war, roughly 15,000 tourists arrived daily.

Egypt: Pharaoh head returns home

A statue of the head of Ramses II, often identified as the pharaoh in Exodus who would not let the Israelites go free from slavery, has been returned to Egypt. The 3,400-year-old monument was stolen from the city of Abydos sometime in the 1980s or ’90s. The exact date is unknown. It was sold in London in 2013 and ended up in Switzerland. The statue is being restored for display.

Russia: Missionary accused of espionage

A South Korean missionary ministering to North Korean laborers in far eastern Russia has been arrested and charged with espionage. Baek Won-soon is accused of giving classified information to foreign intelligence agencies, according to a Russian state-run news agency, though there is no available evidence to support that charge. South Korea has advised its citizens not to travel to Russia amid increasing tensions over the war in Ukraine and Russia’s contribution to the North Korean dictatorship. Baek is being held in Moscow in the same prison as other foreigners—including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—who have been accused without evidence of being spies.

Pakistan: Presbyterians to reunify

Three groups that each claimed to be the real Presbyterian Church of Pakistan have agreed to reunify after six years of conflict. In 2018, a Presbyterian moderator pushed for the extension of a three-year leadership term to five years. Ministers who opposed the move were removed from their congregations, and the church divided into factions, each filing lawsuits and electing its own moderator. In March 2024, however, the groups agreed to come together and formed a committee to work on reunification. They hope to be finished by the end of the year.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "July/August Briefings".

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Review

A Theologian’s Battle with Blindness

John Swinton

When reading and writing are fundamental to your identity, how do you cope with failing eyesight?

Illustration by Eoin Ryan

In his deeply personal memoir The Blurred Cross: A Writer’s Difficult Journey with God, biblical scholar, theologian, and poet Richard Bauckham invites readers on a profound journey of faith, doubt, and resilience in the face of adversity. The book blends autobiography, theological reflection, and poetry to present a raw and honest account of Bauckham’s struggle with deteriorating eyesight and the spiritual challenges that accompanied it.

The Blurred Cross: A Writer's Difficult Journey with God

Richard Bauckham (Author)

208 pages

$17.98

Part of what sets The Blurred Cross apart is its unconventional structure. Bauckham’s story unfolds across 15 short chapters, each offering a distinct perspective on his journey.

The book opens with “A Memory of Tobit,” a chapter that invokes an ancient book—recognized by some Christian traditions, though not Protestants, as part of the Bible’s canon—whose main character loses his sight. Bauckham draws parallels between his experience and that of Tobit, setting the stage for a narrative that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

In the chapters titled “Always Reading” and “Writer and Scholar,” Bauckham lays down the foundational problem underlying the book: When reading is fundamental to your identity, what does it mean to be threatened with losing this ability?

These chapters give readers a vivid impression of the centrality of reading to Bauckham’s sense of who he is in the world and before God. As an academic, he has had a lifelong passion for deep research and careful writing, and the prospect of laying aside this work on account of failing eyesight strikes at the core of the person he assumes himself to be. Bauckham’s understanding of this identity as a reader, both personally and theologically, sets the foundation for everything else to come.

The core of the memoir lies in the chapters clustered under the title “The Story.” These chapters chronicle the worsening of Bauckham’s condition—macular degeneration—and the emotional toll it has exacted. His candid reflections on the fear and frustration that accompanied his diagnosis are powerful and moving but are always held in critical tension by moments of profound spiritual insight and grace.

With unflinching honesty, he describes the anguished dread of losing the ability to read, the sense of isolation and helplessness that followed the diagnosis of macular degeneration in his second eye, and the existential questions that arose. These sections testify to Bauckham’s vulnerability and courage, inviting readers to share in his struggles and triumphs.

However, while the ordeal of losing sight is deeply troubling for Bauckham, this is not a story of doubt in God, although the possibility of doubt does run through his reflections. The question is never “Is there a God?” Instead, Bauckham takes pains to ask where God is amid his suffering.

This is neatly laid out in his chapter on God’s providence. Here he delves into the concept of providence in the context of his own struggles. Drawing upon extensive knowledge of biblical and theological sources, Bauckham grapples with the age-old question of how a loving and omnipotent God can allow suffering and adversity.

He begins by acknowledging the difficulty of reconciling the idea of a benevolent God with the reality of human suffering. He examines various theological perspectives on providence, from the Calvinist notion of God’s meticulous control over every aspect of creation to the more open-ended view of God’s self-limitation and respect for human free will. Bauckham ultimately argues for a nuanced understanding of providence that recognizes both God’s sovereignty and the genuine contingency of the created order.

Central to Bauckham’s reflections in this vein is the biblical story of Job, which he sees as a paradigmatic example of the mystery of divine providence. Like Job, Bauckham has experienced a profound loss that raises questions about God’s purposes. Yet also like Job, he chooses to trust in God’s goodness and wisdom, even in the face of his own seemingly senseless suffering.

Bauckham recounts moments of unexpected blessing and support from friends, family, and even strangers, interpreting these as signs of God’s faithful presence. At the same time, he is careful not to treat God as directly causing or orchestrating every event, recognizing the complex interplay between divine will and human agency.

One of the most powerful aspects of Bauckham’s reflections on providence is his emphasis on the redemptive potential of suffering. Drawing on the apostle Paul’s writings, he suggests that adversity can be a means of spiritual growth as we learn to depend more fully on God’s grace and strength. He sees his own struggles with vision loss as an invitation to deepen his faith and cultivate a more profound sense of gratitude for the gifts of sight and insight.

While Bauckham’s perspective on providence may not resonate with all readers, particularly those who hold to a more deterministic view of divine sovereignty, his reflections are marked by humility, nuance, and a deep respect for the mystery of God. He does not claim to have all the answers but rather invites readers to join him in the ongoing struggle to discern God’s hand at work, even in the darkest of times.

Alongside being a theologian, Bauckham is also an able poet. Interspersed throughout the book are poems that serve as lyrical interludes, framing his experiences through a different lens. Poems such as “The Colour of May” and “Christ in Three Sightings” are accompanied by commentary that illuminates their context and significance. These poetic reflections add depth and texture, demonstrating Bauckham’s gift for distilling complex emotions into evocative verse.

Central to the book is the theme of gratitude. Despite the hardships that he has endured, Bauckham consistently returns to a posture of thanksgiving, acknowledging the many blessings in his life and the ways in which his struggles have deepened his relationship with God. This spirit of gratitude permeates and sustains the whole memoir, serving as a powerful reminder of the transformative potential of hope and thankfulness during adversity.

In an age when many are grappling with unprecedented challenges and uncertainties, The Blurred Cross offers a timely message of hope and resilience. Bauckham’s story is a testament to the enduring power of faith in the face of adversity and a reminder that even in our darkest moments, we are never alone. His honesty about his doubts and fears is refreshing, providing a model for authentic spiritual grappling that eschews easy answers in favor of deeper truths.

While the memoir’s unique structure and theological complexity may not appeal to all readers, those who engage with it will find a work of rare insight and beauty. Through his honest and vulnerable reflections, Bauckham invites readers to join him on a journey of faith, doubt, and discovery, one that leads ultimately to a deeper understanding of God’s presence in our lives. For anyone seeking wisdom and guidance in the face of life’s challenges, this book is an invaluable companion.

John Swinton is professor of practical theology and pastoral care at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, and founding director of the school’s Centre for Spirituality, Health, and Disability. His books include Dementia: Living in the Memories of God and Finding Jesus in the Storm.

“Now I See” ( John 9:25)

by Richard Bauckham

Into my dimness light splashed.
I was dumbfounded.
Who can name this surging brilliance?

Now with eyes redeemed,
washed full of sight,
I see the light
streaming, free-flowing,
wild and profusely
from the fount of grace.

I see
a luminous world
of meadow flowers
and rippling trees,
birds tumbling out of sunlight,
glistening drops
from summer showers.

In pools of light,
the looking-glasses of the sky,
I see
reflected glory,
earth’s returning praise,
all the bright brimmingness
of daylit hours.

At last I see
the haloed head,
the rainbow coloured light
of this new freshened world,
who mixed the mud
and spat the sight into my eyes.
I worshipped.
Who can name this radiance?
Who can doubt his all-redeeming powers?

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Vision of a Suffering Saint".

- More from John Swinton

Ideas

Can a Christian Do a Beer Run?

Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles also weigh in on community group dynamics and an awkward sermon metaphor.

Illustration by Marcos Montiel

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: A woman at our church wants to join my community group, but her husband doesn’t seem to want to connect with the men in the group, and now they don’t want to reach out to him either. The women want to invite the family to join, but I feel uneasy about the husbands’ relationship. —Hesitant in Hawaii

Beth Moore: You used a perfect word in your description: uneasy. One of the biggest challenges of fellowship within a local church is that we may have little in common beyond pulling into the same parking lot on Sundays. We may not even naturally like one another—yet the New Testament calls us family.

If community among flawed humans is anything at all, it’s uneasy, and Jesus likely fashioned it this way on purpose: to require not only his help but also his presence to foster prayer, faith, and the setting aside of personal preferences.

I’ve learned through the years that some of the relationships I found most bewildering to develop became the most satisfying over time. We fought hard for the relationship and won. Sometimes group dynamics prove too strained to maintain, but do give the Lord time to work.

I recommend asking the family to join. If the husband doesn’t wish to come, then you’ve not withheld community from the one longing for it. If he does come but remains aloof, receive him anyway and encourage the group to welcome him.

Disruption is a different story, but let us not be resistant to those who simply don’t feel like a good fit: God may be working toward deeper maturity in your group—and the husband may warm up over time and explain his reluctance.

God bless you all as you take the relational risks that invariably come with community! Seek the Lord, and if he leads differently, don’t give this matter another glance.

Q: I’m a runner involved in a local running group. The group is hosting a one-mile beer race: Before each quarter mile, you drink a whole beer. I’d be at least very buzzed—if not outright drunk—after four beers. Is this the kind of drunkenness the New Testament forbids? —Parched in Pennsylvania

Kevin Antlitz: The short answer is yes. When I think of what the Bible says about alcohol, I think of John’s gospel. Mary’s first words in this gospel, funnily enough, are “They have no more wine” (John 2:3). Jesus’ first miracle is turning water into wine. He did this at a Jewish wedding after the party had been raging for a while, which means the guests were probably already feeling pretty good.

But context matters. Of all things, a wedding is worth celebrating with a few brews.

I’m not so sure about a beer mile.

As I thought about your race, another runner and race came to mind: Eric Liddell and the race he didn’t run. Though a favorite to win the 100-meter dash in the 1924 Olympics, Liddell refused to run in the qualifying heats because they took place on a Sunday.

Liddell went on to win gold in a different event, but his costly obedience offers some helpful perspective. If Liddell was willing to forgo the chance at Olympic glory so as not to disobey the command to rest on the Sabbath (Ex. 20:8–10), you should probably forgo whatever glory is to be had around your local track so as to not disobey God’s prohibition of drunkenness (Eph. 5:18).

So I’d sit this one out—or ask if you can trade cans of beer for cups of milk. If the goal is to be miserable while running a mile, this will help you earn a new PR.

Q: The last time a friend of mine came to stay with me, he visited my church. He’s disabled, and the sermon used a metaphor about disability. It was biblical, and he didn’t comment, but I know he didn’t appreciate it and can understand why. Now he’s coming to visit again. Do I invite him to church? —Mortified in Minnesota

Kiara John-Charles: I can only imagine how uncomfortable the entire sermon must have been for you. You invited a friend with a disability to church, expecting to share the positive experience you’ve had. But the sermon took an unexpected turn with a metaphor about disability, likely leaving you feeling awful.

It’s disheartening when our expectations aren’t met, especially when we’re excited to share an experience.

While your assumption that the sermon made him uncomfortable may be valid, it’s essential to acknowledge that you don’t know for sure. Our own anxieties can sometimes cloud our perception of a situation. And even if he did have unexpressed frustrations, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s against visiting your church again.

Consider asking God for guidance on how best to discuss the idea of attending church together during his visit. God will give you peace and clarity about how to proceed with the conversation.

If I were in your shoes, I would approach this talk casually, giving your friend the power to decide whether he wants to attend or not. Maybe just let him know what time the service is and that you plan to attend, welcoming him to join if he wants to.

If he declines, it provides an opportunity to explore why, if you feel comfortable doing so. On the other hand, if he agrees to come, it could lead to a positive experience, and this time he might find encouragement in a sermon that resonates with him.

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

- More from Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

Theology

Eric Liddell’s Legacy Still Tracks, 100 Years Later

Paul Emory Putz

With his refusal to race on Sunday, the Scottish sprinter showcased a bigger story about Christians in sports.

Illustration by Nate Sweitzer

Eric Liddell took his starting spot in the finals for the 400 meters. More than 6,000 paying spectators filled the stadium on that warm Friday night in Paris, a century ago, when the starting pistol fired and the Scottish runner took off from the outside lane.

And 47.6 seconds later, Liddell had set a new world record, leaving his competitors in awe and his fans grasping to make sense of what they had just witnessed.

Liddell’s sprint at the 1924 Paris Olympics is a canon event in the history of Christian athletes, and not just because of what happened on the track. Liddell entered the 400-meter race only after learning that the heats for his best Olympic event, the 100 meters, would fall on a Sunday. He withdrew from that event, holding fast to his Christian convictions about observing the Sabbath.

Sports matter to us in large part because of the cultural narratives that give them significance. It’s not just that athletes run, jump, reach, and throw with remarkable skill. It’s that those bodily movements are fashioned and framed into broader webs of meaning that help us make sense of the world around us—both what is and what ought to be.

Liddell’s performance in 1924 lingers because it was caught up in cultural narratives about what it means to be a Christian athlete and, by extension, what it means to be a Christian in a changing world.

His story inspired the 1982 Oscar-winning movie Chariots of Fire, which brought his accomplishments back into the spotlight and led to numerous inspirational biographies focused on his Christian legacy.

And as the Olympics return to Paris this summer, Liddell’s name is part of the centennial commemorations. Ministries in Scotland and France are putting on events. The stadium where he raced has been renovated for use in the 2024 games and displays a plaque in his honor. His story still has something to teach us, whether we’re Christian athletes or watching from the stands.

The son of missionaries, Liddell was born in China but spent most of his childhood at a boarding school in London. He was shaped by a broad British evangelicalism, developing habits of prayer, Bible reading, and other practices of the faith. He also had a knack for sports, both rugby and track. Speed was his primary weapon. Standing just 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 155 pounds, his slim frame disguised his strength.

Although he had an unorthodox running style—one competitor said, “He runs almost leaning back, and his chin is almost pointing to heaven”—it did not stop him from emerging as one of Great Britain’s best sprinters. By 1921, as a first-year college student, he was recognized as a potential Olympic contender in the 100 meters.

Although he was a Christian and an athlete, he preferred not to emphasize these combined identities in a public way. He went quietly about his life: studying for school, participating in church, and playing sports.

Things changed in April 1923 when 21-year-old Liddell received a knock on his door from D. P. Thomson, an enterprising young evangelist. Thomson asked Liddell if he would speak at an upcoming event for the Glasgow Students Evangelical Union.

Thomson had toiled for months trying to draw men to his evangelistic events, with little success. As sports writer Duncan Hamilton documented, Thomson reasoned that getting a rugby standout like Liddell might attract the men. So he made the ask.

Eric Liddell’s Olympics portrait, July 1924.

Later in life, Liddell described the moment he said yes to Thomson’s invitation as the “bravest thing” he had ever done. He was not a dynamic speaker. He did not feel qualified. Stepping out in faith called something out of him. It made him feel as if he had a part to play in God’s story, a responsibility to represent his faith in public life. “Since then the consciousness of being an active member of the Kingdom of Heaven has been very real,” he wrote.

The decision carried with it potential dangers too—particularly, Liddell himself would recognize, the danger of “bringing a man up to a level above the strength of his character.” Success in sports did not necessarily mean that an athlete had a mature faith worthy of emulation. Yet sharing his faith brought greater meaning and significance to Liddell’s athletic efforts, helping him integrate his identities as a Christian and an athlete.

Liddell’s decision to speak up in April 1923 set the stage for his decision later that year to step down from Olympic consideration in the 100 meters. He communicated his intentions privately and behind the scenes, with no public fanfare. It became newsworthy, as Hamilton recounts in his biography of Liddell, only when the press became aware and began sharing their opinions.

Some admired his convictions, while others saw him as disloyal and unpatriotic. Many could not comprehend his inflexible stand. It was just one Sunday, and at a time when Sabbath practices in the English-speaking world were rapidly changing. Besides, the event itself would not happen until the afternoon, giving Liddell plenty of time to attend church services in the morning. Why give up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring honor to himself and his country?

Liddell recognized that the world was changing. But the Sabbath, as he understood and practiced it, was to be a full day of worship and rest. It was, for him, a matter of personal integrity and Christian obedience.

And he was not alone in his convictions. In the United States into the 1960s, many evangelicals continued to see full Sabbath observance as a central part of Christian witness. To compete on Sunday was a sign that one might not be a Christian at all—an indicator, one evangelical leader suggested, “that we are either ‘dead in trespasses and sins’ or sadly backslidden and desperately in need of revival.”

Throughout the public debate about his decision, Liddell did not raise complaints about discrimination and oppression. He did not blast the Olympic committee for their refusal to accommodate Sabbath-keeping Christians. He did not take aim at fellow Christian athletes for their willingness to compromise and compete on Sunday. He simply made his decision and accepted the consequences: Gold in the 100 meters was not an option.

If this were the end of the story, Liddell’s example would be an inspiring model of faithfulness—and also a forgotten footnote in history. There is no Chariots of Fire without his triumph in the 400 meters.

Few expected him to have a chance in the significantly longer race. Still, he did not arrive in Paris unprepared. He had a supportive trainer who was willing to adapt, working with Liddell for several months to build him up for both of his Olympic events (Liddell also won bronze in the 200 meters).

He also inadvertently had the science of running on his side. As John W. Keddie, another Liddell biographer, has explained, many then believed that the 400 meters required runners to pace themselves for the final stretch. Liddell took a different approach. Instead of holding back for the end, Keddie said, Liddell used his speed to push the boundaries of what was possible, turning the race into a start-to-finish sprint.

Liddell later described his approach as “running the first 200 meters as hard as I could, and then, with God’s help, running the second 200 meters even harder.” Horatio Fitch, the runner who came in second, saw things in a similar light. “I couldn’t believe a man could set such a pace and finish,” he said.

Beyond the tactics Liddell deployed was a trait that truly great athletes possess: He delivered his best performance when it mattered the most. Running free, without fear of failure, he rose to the occasion in a remarkable way, surprising fans, observers, and fellow competitors. “After Liddell’s race everything else is trivial,” marveled one journalist.

News of Liddell’s achievement quickly spread back home through the press and the radio. He arrived in Scotland as a conquering hero; those who had criticized his Sabbath convictions now praised him for his principled stand.

Biographer Russell W. Ramsey described how he spent the next year traveling with Thomson throughout Great Britain on an evangelistic campaign, preaching a simple and direct message. “In Jesus Christ you will find a leader worthy of all your devotion and mine,” he told the crowds.

Then, in 1925, he departed for China, spending the rest of his life in missionary service before dying in 1945 of a brain tumor at age 43.

In the decades after Liddell’s death, Thomson published books about his protégé and friend, ensuring Liddell’s story remained in circulation among British evangelicals. Track and field enthusiasts in Scotland continued to recount his 1924 triumph as a source of national pride, with faith a key part of his identity. Conservative Christians in the United States spoke of Liddell too, as an example of an athlete who maintained his Christian witness while pursuing athletic excellence.

These groups kept the flame burning until 1981, when Chariots of Fire came out, bringing Liddell’s fame to greater heights—and turning him into an icon for a new generation of Christian athletes navigating their place in the modern world of sports.

Of course, some of the tensions Liddell grappled with in 1924 have grown more challenging in our own day—and new ones have been added. The issue of Sunday sports, on which Liddell took his principled stand, seems like a relic of a bygone era. The question these days is not whether elite Christian athletes should play sports on a select few Sundays; it’s whether ordinary Christian families should skip church multiple weekends of the year so their children can chase travel-team glory.

Eric Liddell is paraded around the University of Edinburgh after his Olympics victory.

In this environment, Liddell’s story is not always a direct analog to current situations. It can also leave us with more questions than answers: Is the tendency to turn to celebrity athletes as leading voices for the Christian faith healthy for the church? How successful was Liddell’s witness, really, if his stand for the Sabbath seemed to have no effect on long-term trends? Does Liddell’s example suggest that faith in Christ can enhance one’s athletic performance and lead to success in life? If so, how do we make sense of Liddell’s death at such a young age?

The beauty of Liddell’s remarkable Olympic performance is not that it answers those questions in a precise way. Instead, it reaches us at the level of imagination, inviting us to delight in the possibility of surprise and to consider what is within reach if we prepare ourselves well for the opportunities that come our way.

It gives us Liddell as both the martyr willing to sacrifice athletic glory for his convictions and the winner showing that Christian faith is compatible with athletic success. It presents us with Liddell as the evangelist using sports as a tool for a greater purpose and as the joyful athlete engaging in sports simply for the love of it—and because through it he felt God’s presence.

As we watch the Olympics this year, those multiple meanings—and new ones besides—will be on display as Christian athletes from all over the world take their shot in Paris. Some will know of the famous Scottish runner, and some will not.

But to the extent that they consciously and intentionally strive after Jesus in the midst of their sports—to the extent that they seek to find the meaning of their experience bound up within the bigger story of God’s work in the world—they’ll be following in Liddell’s footsteps.

And maybe they’ll run a race or make a throw or respond to failure in a way that evokes surprise and wonder—and a way that takes its place in a broader narrative about being a faithful Christian in a 21st-century world.

Paul Emory Putz is director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor University’s Truett Seminary.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Sprinter Who Held Fast".

- More from Paul Emory Putz

Cover Story

He Told Richard Nixon to Confess

Daniel Silliman

Most ministers were silent about Watergate. Why was one evangelical pastor different?

Getty / Keystone

Only one minister spoke up.

There were many clergy in and out of the White House in those years, as Richard Nixon scrambled to cover up the fact that his men had broken into the Democratic Party headquarters and bugged the Watergate office phones to try to give him an unfair advantage in the 1972 presidential election. Various ministers preached to Nixon as the conspiracy unraveled and everything he had done—the casual criminality, disregard for morality, dirt, skullduggery, expletives, compounding lies, secret tapes, and obstruction of justice—came into the light.

But they didn’t address it. They didn’t follow the path of the Old Testament prophet Nathan, who went to King David after David tried to cover up his sin. Nathan spoke in a way that convicted the king—“You are the man!”—and gave him a chance to repent (2 Sam. 12:7).

Nixon also met privately with clergy from a whole array of evangelical churches, plus mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Some were famous. Leaders with authority and prestige, comfortable in the halls of power. Almost to a man, they said nothing.

Except John Huffman.

The evangelical Presbyterian pastor spoke simply and directly about the moral dimensions of the Watergate scandal and spoke with a clarity that Richard Nixon could hear.

Huffman was not well known and still isn’t. Even in the apparently endless writing about evangelicals and politics and all the debates about the proper way to engage in the public square, his name is essentially forgotten.

But I had to know: Why him?

It’s not obvious that Huffman should have had some special dispensation of moral courage. He was the young pastor of a seemingly average church. What gave him the power to resist the flattery and the promise of access that seduced so many?

So I found his phone number. He is still alive and an active church member in California. I called him. Huffman, now 83, was surprised at the questions. He promised to try to answer, but it has been a half century and people don’t ask much about Nixon anymore.

“Now, what is this story that you’re working on?” he said.

For the past several years, I’ve been writing a religious biography of Richard Nixon. He was a Quaker, as many people know, but he wasn’t very devout. He wasn’t pious. In fact, he was amoral, driven by ambition and resentment, his actions moderated only by his shame.

That didn’t serve him well. He ended his presidency in disgrace. To date, Nixon is the only US president forced to resign—making him an odd choice for a religious biography.

But his story is a religious story. Religion was at the root of who Nixon was, the struggle beneath all his successes and failures. Like Jacob in the Bible, Nixon wrestled with God. But he couldn’t accept God’s blessing, wouldn’t accept that the Creator of the universe loved him and he didn’t have to earn that love.

I read a lot about Nixon, writing my book. And a lot by him. I went to the former president’s archives in Yorba Linda, California, and read his memos, notes, and speeches. I looked through his extensive correspondence and read the letters he exchanged with ministers when he was a congressman, senator, vice president, and president.

Nixon’s life and career were actually influenced a lot by ministers. That hasn’t been noted much by previous biographers, who have been more interested—for obvious reasons—in Nixon’s political trajectory than his spiritual journey.

But a Catholic priest named John Cronin, for example, convinced a fresh-faced Congressman Nixon that Communism was the most important issue of the day. Nixon remade himself into a cold warrior and rose to national prominence as a Communist fighter under the guidance of that priest.

When he was vice president, Nixon became friends with evangelist (and CT founder) Billy Graham. Graham helped Nixon shape his public profile. He introduced Nixon to influential religious leaders and coached him on how to talk about his faith while campaigning. At one point, Graham even drafted a political speech that Nixon could give. I found it in the archives.

Nixon’s political career cratered in the 1960s after he lost his first presidential campaign and then, embarrassingly, a race for governor of California. It was another minister who inspired him to pick himself up and run for president again: Norman Vincent Peale, who was famous for his book The Power of Positive Thinking.

President Richard Nixon with Billy Graham (left) and choir director Allen W. Flock (right) at a church service in the White House.

When the controversy over the cover-up of the Watergate break-in started to consume Nixon’s presidency, though, none of these men were there to counsel him to do the right thing.

Cronin, the Catholic priest, had fallen out of the habit of corresponding with Nixon after Nixon’s election in 1968. There’s no evidence he tried to write Nixon about Watergate.

Peale, who had been Nixon’s pastor, didn’t say anything either. The popular preacher was, in truth, a timid and anxious man. His letters to Nixon show a tendency toward wheedling. He wanted Nixon to like him so much that he would never challenge him.

If any minister were going to say something to Nixon, it probably should have been Graham, the “pastor to presidents.” He told Nixon to go to church, read his Bible, and trust Jesus. He spoke clearly and forcefully about the importance of public morality and moral leaders, and he praised Nixon, specifically, for setting a good example for the nation.

But Graham also had a tendency to get distracted by politics. He might call to tell the president he was praying for him and end up talking about the issue of the day or campaign strategy. Graham’s biographer, historian Grant Wacker, told me that the evangelist had an addiction to politics. Graham knew it could obsess him and pull him away from his calling. He would resist for a while but then fall off the wagon.

Graham also could convince himself that partisan victories were critical to the work of telling the world about Jesus. Once in 1971, on a yacht ride up the Potomac with Nixon, Graham said there “wouldn’t be any hope” for evangelism or evangelicalism unless Nixon won reelection. An electoral victory was “absolutely imperative,” he said, implying that he meant not only for the country but also the kingdom of God.

Graham didn’t know it, but he was using the same we-have-to-win logic that would justify the break-in and bugging of the Watergate a year later.

President elect Nixon and his family with Norman Vincent Peale (right) at Peale’s church in New York.

He didn’t speak clearly about the morality of Watergate before it happened—or about the cover-up after. Of course, we can’t know for sure the details of every conversation Graham had with Nixon, but we do have Graham’s diary, recordings of their phone conversations, and notes from people who were in the room (and on the boat) when they talked.

And there’s no evidence that the pastor to presidents ever talked about Watergate in the way Nathan talked to David, no evidence he ever said something like “You are the man.”

Almost no one did.

Nixon organized worship services in the White House instead of going to a church in the nation’s capital like his predecessors. The ministers who came and preached had the opportunity to say something convicting, to speak up. Instead, again and again, they hesitated.

They would show deference, speak in abstractions, and often indulge in a bit of flattery—after all, they felt flattered themselves to be invited to preach in the White House. They would sometimes draft sermons with tough language but then tone it down.

“How do you talk in a prophetic way,” one Episcopal minister said, “without making it look as if you’re taking advantage of the president in his own home?”

I asked John Huffman that question.

The retired pastor, who stepped down as senior minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, in 2009 and from CT’s board of directors in 2015, said misusing the pulpit is a real concern. When you’re preaching to people with power and influence, there is a temptation there that a minister needs to guard against.

“It can be a very selfish act to attack a politician,” Huffman told me. “It can be totally self-aggrandizing. You can’t do that.”

But it can also be tempting, Huffman said, to forget your responsibility and calling: “It’s easy to nod along and not really know what you’re nodding at, except that you’re in the halls of power.”

Huffman said he may have resisted when others didn’t because of his father, John Huffman Sr. The elder Huffman was a minister who became president of Winona Lake School of Theology (now Grace Theological Seminary) in Indiana.

He brought the younger Huffman along as a teenager as he raised funds for the school. Huffman remembers that his father showed no fear as he solicited donations from wealthy industrialists, oilmen, and movie industry moguls. His father was respectful but didn’t bow and scrape.

“My dad said everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time,” Huffman said. “That sounds stupid, but it’s really profound. Every human being is a human being. Every human being is fearful—fearful of being discovered as less than they want to come across.”

Huffman didn’t intend to follow his father into ministry at first. He was interested in politics. He wanted to be like his hero—Richard Nixon.

As a student at Wheaton College, Huffman was president of the Young Republicans, and one of his big accomplishments was bringing Nixon to campus to speak during the 1960 campaign. Huffman remembers thinking he was like Nixon. He had the same instincts, the same work ethic, religious childhood, and hungry ambition.

As he got older, though, Huffman began to worry about the moral hazards of politics. There are so many temptations to compromise. Sam Shoemaker—one of the great preachers of the era—told young Huffman he might do something significant in public service, but he might not. Why gamble? Especially when you knew the eternal value of a life in ministry.

So Huffman chose to become a pastor. He went to Princeton Theological Seminary and got a job assisting Norman Vincent Peale at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. One of his responsibilities was working the church’s “side door” on Sundays.

“The side door was where the privileged people came in,” Huffman said. “I got to know some celebrity types that way. Peale had a whole retinue of very high-profile businesspeople.”

One of the privileged people that came through that door in the mid-1960s was Nixon, then in his “wilderness years” before running for president a second time. Huffman welcomed him and his family and got to know them, Sunday after Sunday.

Huffman, again, learned the importance of seeing influential people as people, just like everyone else. They had mundane spiritual needs, even if they came through a special entrance.

President Nixon and his family with John Huffman (right) on Easter Sunday at Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church.

That was a lesson he took with him to his first full-time ministry role at Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church on an island off the coast of Miami. Despite the exotic location, the church was not Huffman’s first choice. His first, second, and third applications for ministry jobs got rejected, though, and the church in Florida wanted him.

He didn’t tell them he couldn’t find Key Biscayne on a map. He accepted the call and moved down to the resort town in 1968.

That summer, Huffman went for a run with his dog Kelly and happened to meet Nixon on the beach. The presidential candidate—in swim trunks, with a towel around his neck—was relaxing with his close friend, a banker named Bebe Rebozo, who lived in Key Biscayne and happened to attend Huffman’s church.

That Sunday, Nixon attended too. It became a regular thing, a few times a year, for Nixon to escape the White House, visit Rebozo, and go to church.

“It was scary and exciting,” Huffman recalled. “I thought I was heading into oblivion. Then the president, my hero from when I was a kid, is in my pew.”

Huffman, at the time, was just 28. He decided not to preach to Nixon specifically. He wouldn’t bring the controversies about the Vietnam War, student protests, or the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency into his sermons. He trusted the president needed to hear the same Good News as the rest of his congregation.

Then Watergate happened.

Nixon tried to hide it—blaming it on underlings, protesting he knew nothing about it—but the cover-up started to unravel. Huffman told Rebozo he was worried about Nixon. He said Nixon wasn’t handling things in a biblical way. He should be honest and confess.

The next time Nixon traveled to Key Biscayne, the banker grabbed Huffman and told him not to say the word Watergate in his sermon. Forbade him from mentioning it.

Huffman didn’t. But he did speak to Nixon privately. “You need to confess,” he told Nixon. “You need to be honest with the American people.”

And Huffman preached that Sunday on Acts 26:26: “The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.”

The message was clear. The cover-up was immoral. Huffman didn’t add the words of Nathan, but he might as well have said to the president, “You are the man!”

As I write in my book, that sermon hit Nixon. It sent him into retreat. In that isolation, ultimately, his presidency ended.

To me, Huffman’s choice to speak up seems to be a moment of moral courage. It’s a moment when an evangelical—instead of chasing flattery, instead of getting drunk on proximity to power or caught up in partisanship—spoke the truth with clarity.

Huffman recalls it differently. All these years later, he remembers how he felt about Nixon and how he saw in himself the same weaknesses as Nixon, the same susceptibility to sin. He remembers he said the thing he would have wanted someone to say to him as a faithful friend.

“I really loved the man,” Huffman told me.

It makes me think of all the other ministers who didn’t challenge Nixon when they knew he was like a lost sheep, gone astray. I think of all the other powerful leaders caught up in scandal, from King David to Bill Clinton to Donald Trump, and the ministers around them hoping to catch a little reflection off the light of their celebrity.

What made Huffman different? I think it was love.

Daniel Silliman is CT’s news editor. His book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation will be released on August 8, on the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "For the Love of Nixon".

- More from Daniel Silliman

Theology

An Alternative to the Bonhoeffer Option

Jared Stacy

Christians today can learn from WWII-era theologian K.H. Miskotte about resisting without resorting to political violence.

Illustration by Lisk Feng

Editor’s note: This article appeared in print before the assassination attempt against former president Donald Trump. We’re publishing it online ahead of schedule given its relevance to the present moment.

The US is in another presidential election that, in many ways, triggers a déjà vu of 2020—a high-water mark for political and social unrest many might wish to forget. And while we may not be living in entirely unprecedented times (as a brief review of the not-too-distant 1960s serves to remind us), our country is experiencing a rise in politically motivated violence.

A 2023 study from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that 40 percent of both Biden and Trump supporters “at least somewhat believed the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.” In response to similar findings by the Public Religion Research Institute, the National Association of Evangelicals released a statement by evangelical leaders condemning violence as a justifiable political tool.

Responses like these are welcome and helpful. It’s crucial for evangelical leaders and clergy who minister at the level of everyday life to speak and act against this alarming trend and the desperation that justifies it.

Yet I believe the Spirit of Jesus has given the church more to face our present moment. Political violence isn’t just a sociopolitical problem to be denounced—it demands a fresh vision of discipleship cultivated and encouraged from the pulpit.

As French theologian Jacques Ellul wrote, “the role of the Christian in society” is to “shatter fatalities and necessities” associated with violence. Such a broad task requires a more robust vision of pastoral theology, one that rejects passivity to imagine a faithful Christian presence in a hostile sociopolitical climate.

One possible source for this renewed vision is the historic witness of Kornelis Heiko Miskotte—a Dutch Reformed pastor theologian who spent the war in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Miskotte defied Adolf Hitler’s political regime and risked his life to shelter Jews in his home. But he also participated in a uniquely theological form of resistance through his writings, including a widely distributed biblical tract its editors say served as a kind of “anti-Nazi catechism.”

Miskotte was a contemporary of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as a fellow admirer of Karl Barth. Yet his name has been relatively forgotten in history, in part because his works were not translated into English until recently. But there may be another reason for Miskotte’s obscurity compared to Bonhoeffer: He did not die for his cause.

When it comes to defying Christian passivity, Christians often call on the wisdom of Bonhoeffer, who was a leading voice in the Confessing Church—a clergy movement that resisted the Nazification of Germany’s Protestant churches. Rather than flee to America, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany before the war. He was barred from lecturing and preaching and eventually joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—which led to his imprisonment and ultimate execution.

Yet many today have fractured and co-opted Bonhoeffer’s legacy by lifting his biography from his theology. This distortion creates a “Bonhoeffer option”—which amounts to tacit permission to entertain political violence as a viable solution. In a recent article defending evangelical support for Trump, professor Mark DeVine does just that, writing, “Bonhoeffer saw civilization itself in the crosshairs of evil. So do Trumpers.”

Yet German theologian Hans Ulrich, who studied under some of Bonhoeffer’s contemporaries after the war, writes differently than DeVine: “Bonhoeffer’s witness is not his death but his desire to fulfill the will of God.”

In the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt, Bonhoeffer freely welcomed God’s judgment, writing,

If one has completely renounced making something of oneself—whether it be a saint or a converted sinner or a church leader … then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God.

Bonhoeffer’s decision placed him beyond the limits of ethical systems, frustrating those who would use him as moral justification for political violence. Instead, we must attend to the theology that fueled Bonhoeffer’s faith, which was born from years of wrestling with God’s will against the backdrop of everyday life—and in helping his church do likewise. Only a robust pastoral theology rooted in everyday fidelity can imagine a faithful theological resistance to evil.

Biblical pastoral theology should give clergy resources to help their church members answer vital questions like “Whom do we trust?” and “In what do we hope?”—which have a profound impact as much on our everyday lives as in the most extreme moments. And as Eugene Peterson would say, a pastor’s primary job is not galvanizing congregants for a partisan cause but rather, in the words of his biographer, “teaching people to pray and teaching them to die a good death.”

One way pastoral theology makes this possible is by reminding people of the power of God’s Word—which brings us back to Miskotte. When his fellow Dutch citizens were faced with the costly choice of pious inaction or violent reaction, Miskotte invited them to a theologically sustained yet politically active form of resistance. This, he believed, began with the simple yet radical act of listening:

Many cry out for action. But could it be, that the primordial action is hearing—the hearing that arose in former times as resistance against the worldly powers, giving rise to martyrdom and a new song; a new diaconate, a new confession, and suffering and action arose.

Miskotte saw that the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam yielded a surprising, fresh hunger for the Scriptures—including an outbreak of Bible study groups across occupied cities in the winter of 1940. Miskotte personally facilitated some of these underground meetings and, with his theological training, published and distributed a study guide to meet the desperate need for biblical resources.

His pamphlet, titled Biblical ABCs, took aim at the religious roots of Nazism. The primer began with the importance of God’s name, which Miskotte saw as the “cornerstone” of all “resistance” to authoritarianism and truth decay. “The more firmly we believe in the Name,” Miskotte writes, “the more unbelieving we become toward the primordial powers of life.”

Miskotte hoped that by reencountering this living God and reimagining what it means to be biblical, Dutch Christians might cultivate a “better resistance” to the Nazi occupation.

In this way, Miskotte saw Christian sanctification as a form of sabotage. The God of Israel revealed in the Bible and in Jesus Christ, Miskotte said, “is from the outset Saboteur.” Not only does Jesus destroy our manmade ideas about God and religion, but sanctification initiates us into God’s ongoing holy sabotage of our lives and the sociopolitical worlds that define them. Biblical holiness, Miskotte argued, is not just moral virtue but sanctified sabotage.

In his essay on Miskotte’s work, theologian Philip G. Ziegler says a key to “the sanctification of the Name is active disbelief and disobedience vis-à-vis the chthonic and religious powers driving natural life.”

Yet even this form of nonviolent theological resistance is often regarded as literal subversion by the political establishment—especially people whose visions of peace, justice, and greatness conflict with those of the kingdom of God.

For instance, when one of Miskotte’s fellow Dutch pastors, Jan Koopmans, published a similar pamphlet confessing, “We are Christians first, Dutch second,” the Dutch SS flagged Koopmans’s file and labeled him as a dangerous “saboteur.” Miskotte seized on that accusation and appropriated it subversively for the Dutch church.

Faithful discipleship has always posed a risk to the political establishment—beginning in the first-century Roman world. To proclaim “Jesus is Lord” then was to question Caesar’s claim of total authority, and thus this confession was seen as an indirect sabotage and subversion of the Roman order and the violence that built it.

Kornelis Heiko Miskotte

Even the word Christian first emerged as a way for Roman authorities to code early believers as dangerous political agitators and enemies of the Pax Romana, or “Roman peace”—and only later did believers appropriate the term for themselves.

Just as the earliest Christians’ devotion to the Jewish Messiah subverted Caesar’s sovereignty, “saboteurs” like Miskotte and the Confessing Church threatened Hitler’s supremacy in Europe. And while this makes it sound as if the Christian heritage is associated with overt political posturing and rebellion, God’s form of sabotage is ultimately not of this world—even as it remains for this world.

Holy sabotage is brought about not by the power to crucify but by the power of one who was crucified. This translates into a political presence that, according to Stanley Hauerwas, exists “so that the world may know there is an alternative to the violence that characterizes the relations between peoples and nations.”

To be Christian is to confess that Jesus alone is Lord—a God who will have no rivals, no counter-creeds, and no rogue words against the Word. This divine Saboteur does not leave us with our rage, nations, causes, or principles—all elements that prime us toward violence. Instead, he sets us apart for himself.

More than that, God sets us apart together. Whenever and wherever we gather, we become an insurgent church—a people and place where the stories and slogans of our social and political world are emptied of their power and crucified on the cross. The common life of the church is, in its very nature, a public witness to the world—an invitation to relinquish our natural, often violent methods of empire building to embrace the supernatural provision of Jesus Christ.

Yet the communal mission of the church is often extinguished by times of relative peace and piety. Miskotte noticed that the Nazi occupation in Amsterdam exposed the long-standing rot of insular Dutch churches and their infighting factions. “We have the church, and we have individual believers,” he said, “but we don’t have communities.”

Amid the horrors of World War II, Miskotte proclaimed that “the pious world of so-called church life must come to an end”—and in its ruins, a new church was being birthed. In his review of Biblical ABCs, Koopmans spoke of the national church’s breakdown and the revival of study groups gathering in homes, saying, “Through this War, God teaches us to ask for the Bible. … we almost don’t have a Church anymore, apart from the form in which it can be found in the Bible.”

As Miskotte wrote, “The mystery of the church is, that something happens there.” That “something” flows from a renewed hunger for the Word of God.

In the same way, resisting political violence in our day requires the church to renew its identity as the community of God’s Word. The American church today is divided by allegiances to various partisan causes—leading to what feels like the collapse of our common life as Christians. We have neglected Paul’s instruction to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). And if pastoral theology is to unite the church and revive its public ministry, it must encourage congregants to be devoted to the Spirit of Jesus, not the spirit of the party.

To resist political violence is not to be rebranded by another cause but to be renewed together as the body of Christ. This is our primary theological resistance against all worldly powers that would seek to divide us, claim our loyalty, or call us to arms. As Miskotte reminds us, “the church is the church by faith in becoming the church, again and again.”

Instead of the Bonhoeffer option and its anomalous permission for violence, American Christians can rediscover the wisdom of pastoral theology in Miskotte and—closer to home—similar witnesses like Martin Luther King Jr., who during the Montgomery bus boycott instructed participants to

pray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence in word and action as you enter the bus. … If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times.

As Miskotte reminds us, Christian sanctification involves partnering in God’s holy sabotage of our world and its mechanisms of violence. The church’s prophetic task is witnessing to the peace of Christ, which reconciles and sustains the world. A restored humanity is possible only at the Cross, not by the sword. And as dissident disciples, we smuggle this subversive message as witnesses in, to, and for a hostile world that is being reconciled to God but has yet to recognize it.

As sanctified saboteurs baptized into God’s life, we say boldly, “We are Christians before we are Americans,” in accordance with our primal confession that Jesus is Lord.

Jared Stacy is a theologian and Christian ethicist who served for nearly a decade as a pastor to evangelical congregations in New Orleans, Los Angeles, and the Washington, DC, area.

This article appeared in the July/August, 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Sabotaging Political Violence".

- More from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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